Nellie Builds Her First Assembly

Please note this is the fourth in a series of posts on QuickBooks Point of Sale by our staff Point of Sale expert, Leah Swain.

Now that Nellie has entered all of her dry good ingredients and the Units of Measure she is ready to Build her Assembly Item. Viola, Nellie’s Chocolate Chip Cookie!

To begin, manually add a new item and select Assembly Item in the “Item Type” field.

Fill in as much information using the fields we discussed earlier. Leave Vendor and Order Cost empty.

Save Item

In your Item list use the top search bar to search for the new item you created using the item name. Single click to highlight the Item name.

In the top right of the Item List click “Show Details.

In the details Window next to the item type field click “Assembly”

In the new window on the lower right click “Edit Assembly”

The Edit Assembly Window will appear. Use the top search bar to begin searching for items to add to the assembly. Our first one is Flour.

Select the item to add it to the assembly.

Click “Qty/Units” to change the default sale unit to the Unit of Measure you need for your assembly.

Nellie’s recipe calls for 2 cups of flour. I select Cup as my Unit and enter 2 for the quantity.

Hit Ok to save and continue for each item needed for your assembly item, changing Units and Quantities as you go. Here is an example of Nellie’s cookies when all the ingredients are entered.

Note the area with Pricing. It shows how much each assembly item added costs relative to the qty. For example: 1 bag of chocolate chips is 4.00. If I had entered .5 for half a bag it would calculate that cost as $2.

Note that the cost for this recipe if you total that column is $9.40. Nellie was only selling each cookie for $1.50. Remember this was entered as a complete recipe. It makes approximately 15 cookies. To handle this properly the cookies were then set up in, you guessed it, Multiple Units Of Measure to be sold as a full batch or individually.

Now that Nelly had exact costs determined by the system she wanted to check her price level. To find her profit she divided 15 (number of cookies per batch) by 9.4 (cost per batch) and found each cookie was costing her 1.59 to make. She was Losing Money! She corrects her pricing to 2.50 per cookie and now is ready to bake cookies! The last step is to make inventory for the assembly Item.

Open the Assembly item as directed in previous steps as though you were going to edit the item.

In the upper right-hand corner select “Build”

The system will look at your current inventory quantities for assembly pieces and determine how many assembly items you can build with the items on hand.

Enter in the number of Assembly Items you want to build.

Click Build. Your on-hand quantity of Assembly pieces will automatically be reduced by the number of items used to build the new assembly item and the assembly item on hand quantity will increase by the number you built.

If you decide to see a single piece of the assembly separately after being allocated to the assembly item as a piece you would follow the same steps but use the Break button instead to “disassemble” the item back into individual pieces. Obviously, this can’t happen with the cookies one they are built. If your assembly item is a fishing rod, for example, you could disassemble the item to sell only the reel if need be.

In our next post we will see what happens when people love the cookies and Nellie decides to start selling a cookie kit item group!